Guy Rose’s “The Leading Lady,” a portrait of Lucretia del Valle ﻿in her role as Doña Josefa Yorba ﻿in “The Mission Play,” won the gold medal at San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition in 1915.

No less than Henry Van Dyke, a professor of English literature at Princeton University, called “The Mission Play” by John Steven McGroarty “the greatest of all the world’s pageant dramas.” The three-hour extravaganza played in Southern California for 20 years, starting in 1911, attracting more than 2.5 million people with the slogan, “If you haven’t been to see the Mission Play, you haven’t seen California.”

It’s unlikely anyone will call Guy Rose’s “The Leading Lady” — a portrait of Lucretia del Valle in her role as Doña Josefa Yorba in “The Mission Play” — the greatest of all the world’s paintings, but it did win the gold medal at San Diego’s Panama-California Exposition in 1915, which marks the inauguration of Balboa Park.

Now, Rose’s “The Leading Lady” has found an honored place at Balboa Park’s San Diego History Center, which put the life-size, 70-inch-by-60-inch portrait on display this week. ﻿William C. Foxley, a well-known collector who owned a house in San Diego for nearly 20 years, donated the painting.

“We’re thrilled to have it,” said David Kahn, the center’s executive director. “It documents part of the story of the Exposition of 1915-1916. We’re displaying it now, but it will also be displayed in 2015, when we do an exhibit for Centennial.”

Foxley and the center declined to disclose the painting’s appraised value, instead pointing to a 2005 Sotheby’s auction where a smaller Rose painting, “Owens River, Sierra Nevada, California,” sold for $1,920,000, setting a record for a work by a California impressionist painter.

However, as UCSD Professor Emeritus Bram Dijkstra points out, Rose’s landscapes, not his earlier portraits, are his most characteristic, plein-air, pieces. And “The Leading Lady” is not among Rose’s best paintings.

“It’s really not a great work. But it’s historically interesting, and it’s of a period that is absolutely essential in the development of San Diego,” said Dijkstra, a curator, collector and historian who has frequently written about 20th-century California art. “We often look at paintings as having to be great masterpieces that take our breath away, but they are often as important as aspects of the historical development of a culture.”

“The Leading Lady” is not only significant for its relationship to the 1915 Exhibition, but for the actress it portrays, Lucretia del Valle. She was a descendant of Fernando Villa, who came to California with the founder of the California missions, Junipero Serra. Her father, Reginaldo del Valle, was owner of Rancho Camulos near Los Angeles and a California state senator.

As much as del Valle’s connections, however, Kahn is interested in the period the painting depicts and the way it depicts it.

“This painting is yet another document in this fascination in Southern California for a kind of mythic Spanish heritage,” Kahn said. “There were Spaniards here, but I think at the time things got cleaned up a little and idealized. I’m sure these people were mostly hardscrabble farmers, soldiers and this sort of thing. They weren’t sashaying around in fancy clothes like this lady is wearing in the painting.”